The Girl with Braided Hair

by Rasha Adly

  By now, Yasmine was all but staring, in open-mouthed surprise, which he noticed.

  “That’s not all. Often I will hear noises: music and singing, giggles and laughter, and champagne corks popping and the clinking of glasses. I go out to see what’s going on, but I can’t see anything, and the sounds stop as if they’d never been there—but when I go back to my desk, it starts up again.” He shook his head. “It’s not only the spirits of the French folk that haunt this place: there are Mamluks and Ethiopian slaves, servants, and guards of the house. I see everyone in their different clothes, and I hear them chattering in different languages.”

  “Ah,” she nodded sagely, thinking to herself that this man was definitely losing his marbles. He was certainly old enough. But then, what about Caffarelli and Pauline, whom he had described with great accuracy? “What of the spirit of this girl in the painting?” she found herself asking. “Haven’t you seen her pass by as well?”

  The man seemed to sense the hint of disbelief in her tone. “You’re making fun of me, aren’t you,” he said calmly. It was not a question. “I swear to you that this house is inhabited by the spirits and shades of everyone who once lived here, as if there’s something about it that makes them reluctant to leave it.”

  “Can I visit the storage room?” she blurted out.

  “Yes,” he nodded, “of course.”

  He opened a drawer and took out a round keychain with a disc hanging from it, crammed with brass keys. “I can’t believe it,” Yasmine couldn’t help saying. “This is your security system? In this day and age?”

  “And why not?” he replied calmly, rising and starting to head out of the room. His back was bowed and he shuffled slowly on his way, feeling his way with each step so as not to slip.

  Yasmine followed. “There are newer ways of keeping things safe: self-closing doors with programmed keys and passcodes or fingerprint locks.” He chuckled to himself, walking a few steps ahead of her. At the end of the corridor was a door to the left; it opened onto a passageway that ended in a spiral staircase. She followed him down to another old wooden door, which creaked in a series of staccato bursts when he pushed it open.

  The storage room took up the entire cellar of the house, equal in area to the size of the structure above it. She noticed immediately that it felt cold, damp, and musty, with no ventilation or sunlight: this could be the source of the damage that had befallen the painting, especially if it had been stored in here all this time. The smell of the canvas that the portrait had been painted on was saturated with the smell of this place, already familiar to Yasmine.

  “No ventilation at all down here?” she asked.

  “This is the cellar or the shelter,” he said, “designed to be used in times of danger. The scientists of the Campaign used it to safeguard their secrets and important discoveries, especially after the Revolt of Cairo in 1798, when the people stormed the homes of the French and attacked them and burned them to the ground, destroying what was inside.”

  Yasmine nodded thoughtfully. “What about the damaged pieces in the Institute’s collection? Were they put in here as well?”

  “Yes, they were kept here temporarily under great secrecy, but now they’ve been sent away to the labs to be conserved.”

  Everything the man said indicated that the artist had used this shelter to hide his painting away to keep it safe from theft or damage. Yasmine paced slowly around, taking the place in, now looking at it as a researcher, now as a detective, which was, after all, what she had become since she had found the painting. Several closets and cubby holes, she noticed, lined the walls, perhaps built to store papers and tools. The warping and creases in the canvas in her possession indicated that it had been folded up. The artist must have shoved it into one of these, perhaps hiding it under a table or similar, and it had only come to light when the storage shelter was combed meticulously to move the damaged works to a restoration center. “Everything indicates,” she whispered to herself with a new certainty, “the painting never left this room since he painted it.”

  She left, happy in her new discovery; she was convinced now that the artist who had painted the portrait was indeed part of the French Campaign and that he had lived and worked here. And if he was one of the Campaign artists, the other works she had tracked down would have been painted while he was stationed in Egypt.

  She arrived home filled with energy from her discoveries. “Hello, Grandma!” she sang out.

  Her grandmother did not return her enthusiastic greeting.

  “What’s wrong, Grandma?” Her grandmother often took to childishly pouting when something upset her. Yasmine was aware of why she was upset. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m just very busy with something these days. There are . . . problems I need to solve. But don’t worry, I’m nearly done with them and I’ll be free to spend time with you again.”

  “I don’t want you to be free to spend time with me. You hardly talk to me. I sit alone all the time with nothing but the walls for company.”

  “How can you say that, Grandma? What happened to all your relatives, your family, your friends you talk to for hours?”

  The woman looked away. “They’re busy too.”

  She knew she wasn’t spending enough time with her grandmother, the old woman who was as dependent on her as a small child. What would she do about her, she wondered, if she married?

  Married? She rolled the word around in her head. Why had she not been preoccupied with marriage like every other girl she knew? She had never felt the ticking clock or nagging thought of marriage, although she was past thirty. Had she devoted herself to her studies and research without noticing her life slipping past? She knew that her mother’s suicide had made her despise the social construct known as marriage: it was a cheating husband that had driven her to kill herself. This was at least part of the reason why she had commitment issues with Sherif, running away the minute she got close. She had never daydreamed of her wedding day, or thought what her wedding gown might look like; she had never looked at bedroom sets or children’s rooms in stores and thought of them one day being hers. And when she went to a wedding, she had never jostled with the other girls to catch the bride’s bouquet.

  She unclipped her hair, put on her pajamas, and flung herself, exhausted, onto the bed. She suddenly thought of the man she had met today and what he had said about ghosts and spirits in Beit al-Sinnari. She smiled, then fell into a deep sleep.

  Cairo: November 1798

  On my way home, I carefully carried the bag she left in my care before leaving the garden with entreaties to take good care of it. I am now certain of her feelings for me: she sacrificed her crowning glory so that it might not be touched by another man. This young girl possesses enviable courage. She did it without fear of Bonaparte, the man feared by the strongest men. I shall never abandon Zeinab.

  Gaspard Monge, the head of the artists, spied me straight upon my entrance through the door. He instructed me to draw the house in which we live. It is to be documented in the great volume being completed by the scientists of the Expedition, to be entitled The Description

  of Egypt.

  The house is designed in a style which displays these people’s uniqueness in their Islamic architecture. Despite the ubiquitous ignorance and poverty, there are clear glimmerings of their keen intelligence and artistic sensibility, although this intelligence, sadly, lies fallow, without proper direction.

  I sat down to draw the plot, some 1150 square meters in size, with 810 of those occupied by buildings, in addition to a garden some 345 square meters in area. This is the house where I roam freely, seeing splendor to rival the palaces of Paris, but with a unique Oriental aura. It is composed of a ground floor and two upper stories; it may be divided into five main parts. First, there is the entrance; then there is the part devoted to movement and communications; there is a service area; there is an area devoted to the reception of guests; and finally, a women’s quarters. The house has one façade, which is the north side, looki
ng onto the north. There are three courtyards in the house: one for the entrance, one private for the womenfolk, and an internal courtyard annexed to the service areas.

  What inspires sorrow is that this house was forcibly rid of its inhabitants that they might be replaced by the Sciences and Arts Committee. Although this permitted me the luxury of inhabiting this splendid place, I cannot but grieve for them. It is certain that whoever constructed a place of such beauty to live in would be stricken to be expelled from it and for others to be brought in to take their place. This is more true for the fact that we have changed some features of the house: we have taken over the women’s quarters as our painting studio, and the storehouse for foodstuffs and clothing has become the place where we store our equipment. This is not the only structure that we have documented in The Description of Egypt: we have documented a goodly number of buildings, including Beit Hassan al-Kashef and Beit al-Alfi, Bonaparte’s headquarters. Of all these, though, Beit al-Sinnari is by far the loveliest.

  Day after day, meetings and celebrations are held at the seat of Bonaparte’s reign for the leaders and scientists of his campaign, but I make my excuses and refrain from attending. I take more pleasure in going out and walking around this place, looking at faces and learning about the different trades. These smiling, content faces that make haste to assist you, I say, for I frequently take a wrong turn on my return journey due to the narrowness of the alleyways and passages and the fact that they looked all similar, but no sooner do I ask for directions than I have a volunteer to convey me to my destination, despite the fact that my language and my features indicate that I am a Frenchman, and they hate with a passion all that is French. Still, this never impedes them from assisting me, and this odd nature of people has enamored me of them. I admired their determination to defend their homeland, for all Bonaparte’s efforts to ingratiate himself. He knows full well in what high esteem they hold their faith, and his speeches glorify their religion, its prophet, and its rituals. Even Zeinab, an innocent girl, was not taken in by him; she was not enamored of his uniform, his medals, or his illustrious name, a name that shines like a sword in the sunlight. His feigned tenderness and softness with her did not fool her, nor did his patience in undoing her braids one by one. She cut them off and sought to free herself of him.

  21

  She passed by a bakery famous for its French pastries to buy her grandmother’s favorite chocolate cake. She had decided that they would spend the evening together to make up for the days she had neglected her in favor of the painting. The strange thing was that there was no one but her to keep her grandmother company: her other grandchildren were all over the globe, and only called her on the telephone on feast days and special occasions. Other than that, there was no one: everyone she had known in her life was no longer in the land of the living, friends, family, and neighbors all. It is a painful thing to have to live on without everyone with whom we have grown up and lived our lives while we await our own death, like a person packed for a journey that will start soon, very soon, although we do not know when exactly.

  She put the cake on the table and made two cups of tea, her grandmother sitting and smiling like a happy little girl. Her hands shook so much when she took the plate of cake from Yasmine that she asked, “Haven’t you been taking your nerve medicine?”

  “I have,” she said, “but what can medicines do for these old nerves? My nerves are shot and no amount of medicine can fix them.”

  She watched her grandmother fight the tremors in her hand to cut up the cake with her fork, not trying to help her, as she knew that would make her feel patronized and feeble. “I used to make a chocolate cake every Thursday,” her grandmother reminisced, “and invite our family, friends, and neighbors over. My home was always full of guests. I liked them and they loved being there with me. Funny, they stopped visiting me and calling. The telephone hardly

  ever rings.”

  Yasmine let her be: why tell her? Tell her that they were all dead, and she was the only one left.

  Her grandmother kept reminiscing. “On my high school graduation—it was a girls’ school, and it had the best class of girls in Cairo—we learned embroidery and crochet and sewing and dressmaking and home decoration and flower arrangement and cooking and all the arts to prepare a girl to be a homemaker of the best and smartest class.” She took a bite of her cake. “On my high school graduation,” she resumed, “I made a white lace gown, and embroidered it with flowers, with little pearls in the center.” She smiled. “Everyone was wild about it. The teachers adored it, and the girls went crazy over it. I was the top of my class, and the girls offered me huge sums for it. But I refused. I kept it just as it was. I never even dreamed of wearing it!”

  “But why not?” Yasmine asked, caught up in the tale.

  “I don’t know,” her grandmother shrugged. “I was afraid of it getting dirty or torn, I think. I wanted to keep it pristine, untouched by anyone’s hand and without anyone wearing it.”

  Yasmine leaned forward. “What use is it, then?” she asked. “What use is a piece of art if nobody can see it or have a chance to admire it?”

  “I don’t know. It was like a precious jewel. I wanted to protect it from everything, even from people looking at it.” Her grandmother’s eyes shone. “Let me give it to you for your wedding dress.”

  “Me?” Yasmine said, stunned. “Me wear it?”

  “Yes. It’s just your size.”

  “Do you know how long it’s been in the closet?” Yasmine cried out. “The fabric must have rotted away by now. It’ll be all yellow . . . not to mention it’ll be out of style.”

  “No, no!” her grandmother shook her head hard as if denying some accusation. “It’s as fresh and new as the day I made it. I put it in plastic to stop it fading. As I was flipping through the channels on the TV yesterday, there was a fashion show by a famous French designer, and one of the models was wearing a dress just like it.”

  Seeing nothing for it, Yasmine said meekly, “Yes, Grandma.”

  “But when are you and he announcing your wedding?”

  She made a vague positive response to please her grandmother and save herself the trouble of a fruitless and pointless conversation. “Soon.”

  Later, she thought about her grandmother’s words, and of the man who she assumed was her granddaughter’s future husband. She thought about how he had changed since that new girl had come into his life. He had not called her in a while. He gave her less attention. With the intuition that every woman possesses, she could feel that something was the matter. But she could not blame him, in any case.

  She went into her room to resume her research on the other man who had come into her life all of a sudden. She found a new painting by him entitled “The Revolt of Cairo.” The painting depicted two sides locked in fierce combat: the French in their military costume, their horses so lifelike you could practically hear their loud neighing, and the common people of Egypt who had come out to confront Napoleon and his army. Looking at the painting, you could see the power evoked by the military uniforms, representing training and knowledge of the arts of battle, in the face of men filled with honor and dignity standing unarmed in defense of their land with all the courage, valor, and chivalry they possessed—quite unlike the other, more famous historical painting of the same subject, which depicted Egyptians as a weak, powerless rabble crushed beneath the hooves of the French fighters’ horses.

  All the paintings of the Campaign had depicted Napoleon as almost a god, perched high atop his horse while everyone clustered like slaves around and beneath him. But this work showed a battle of equals, the Egyptian confronting the Frenchman, the artist seemingly wishing to depict a truth that many ignored.

  Day by day, the picture had grown clearer: it was all based on assumptions, true, with nothing certain as yet, but all the threads of her investigation were leading her somewhere. The one stumbling block to her theory was the absence of Alton Germain’s name from the list of the French Campaign a
rtists.

  She woke the next morning with one thought in her mind: she must go to France to attend the conference. This would help her with her search for this man, in the place he was from. The emails she had sent to the website asking for more information and whether he was an artist of the Campaign had gone unanswered. She rang up the airline and booked her ticket.

  At noon, Sherif called. “How’s Zeinab?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Anything new?”

  “You care about her more than me. You didn’t even ask about me, just about her,” she joked.

  “Haven’t you noticed recently that she’s all you care about?”

  “Yes. And haven’t you noticed recently that all you care about is that girl whose name I don’t remember?”

  She had been expecting him to respond that he only cared about her, and to ask what girl she was talking about. Instead, there was a moment of silence on the other end, after which he changed the subject. “So, have you found anything?”

  “I’ve found a lot, but nothing for sure. I’m going to go to Paris to see for myself.”

  “Paris?” She could hear him blowing out smoke. “You didn’t say anything about leaving the country.”

  “I only decided a few hours ago,” she explained. “I was invited to the annual conference of the Association for Art History, and I wasn’t going, but now I think it’s a good chance to do more research there.”

  “I hope to see you before you go. If you have time, that is.”

  “Of course, we’ll meet before I go.”

  His voice held a gentle reproof, the source of which she could not guess.

  Cairo: October 1798

  We were graced with calm in the country for some time. Those of lesser intelligence imagined that the Egyptians had accepted matters as they were. I knew that it was the calm before the storm.